The script for What Would Kenny Do? has had a terrific birth. A buddy comedy about a 17-year-old boy guided by a hologram of himself as an adult, it made the prestigious Black List of unproduced screenplays three years ago, before being touched up by (500) Days of Summer's Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber. Now Will Smith's production company is interested in finally taking it to the screen.

But don't get too excited. It's been reported that the two stars of What Would Kenny Do? look set to be Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber. Again, that's Ashton Kutcher – last seen playing Ashton Kutcher in a film about Ashton Kutcher being Ashton Kutcher. And Justin Bieber – last seen being shot to death on an episode of CSI. Together. On screen. At the same time. Together. Worse still, depending on your point of view, Ashton Kutcher will be playing a version of Justin Bieber or Justin Bieber will be playing a version of Ashton Kutcher. Either way, you should probably brace yourself for something genuinely nightmarish.

But if Kutcher and Bieber think that they can just swan in and become the most offensively terrible double act of all time, they've got another thing coming. Movie history is littered with the corpses of hopelessly mismatched buddy films, and Kutcher and Bieber will have to go over and above the call of duty if they even want to breathe the same air as some of the worst.

For example, it barely seems feasible that Kutcher and Bieber could be as spectacularly woeful as Robert Carlyle and the kilt-wearing version of Samuel L Jackson in The 51st State. Prior to that film, Carlyle was the fiery future of British acting and Jackson was the coolest man alive. Afterwards, Carlyle slunk off to America to make dodgy sci-fi TV shows and Jackson primarily became known for being the bloke out of Snakes on a Plane.

And there's little chance that What Would Kenny Do? will be nearly as hopeless as 1997's Double Team, the film that consciously decided to buddy Jean-Claude Van Damme with green-haired basketball weirdo Dennis Rodman and make them battle a nonspecific international conspiracy by jumping out of an aeroplane and getting chased around by tigers. Or Burt Reynolds and nine-year-old Norman D Golden II in Cop And A Half. Or Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty in Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. Or Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett in Hollywood Homicide. And I'll be staggered if Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber could summon up even less chemistry than Pat Morita and Jay Leno managed in their godawful 1989 action comedy Collision Course.

But perhaps we shouldn't write Kutcher and Bieber off yet. After all, as both a former and prospective host of MTV's Punk'd, they obviously have an affinity with abject dreadfulness. And if there are any two people on Earth capable of being as stingingly unwatchable as Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy were in 2002's Showtime, it's them. I'm sure they won't let me down.